This special screening of the artist Lu Yang’s film DOKU: The Self (2022, 36 mins) is part of the Lu Yang’s Screen Bodies exhibition at the Australian Centre on China in the World.

The film is the first narrative work in a series featuring the artist’s digital avatar, “Doku,” who shares facial features with Lu Yang, but lives in a virtual world rich in Buddhist iconography. In DOKU: The Self, Lu Yang adds autobiographical detail to Doku’s world. Following a near-death experience in an airplane crash, Doku journeys through six reincarnations from vengeful shaman to terrified passenger, taking viewers on a wild ride that challenges binary distinctions between life and death.

The film screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion with Gabriel Remy-Handfield and Jori Snels.

About the Speakers

Gabriel Remy-Handfield is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and East Asian visual art and culture at the University of Montreal. His academic interests encompass contemporary art and visual culture, focusing on queer studies, new materialisms, critical posthumanism, Deleuze and Guattari studies, Buddhist philosophy, performance studies, and the new media/ digital arts. His dissertation examines the aberrant aesthetics of the work of Lu Yang.

Jori Snels is a curator and joint degree PhD researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (Western Sydney University) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam). She is working on an NWO-funded research project about how digital technologies affect the ways people live and think about themselves and the world, as visualized in Chinese digital art. She graduated with distinction from the MA Art Studies at the University of Amsterdam and in her current research combines her background in art history with methods and theories from China studies, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Screen Bodies, World Art, Art and the Public Sphere, and Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis. She was a member of the 2022 cohort of the IMPAKT Full Spectrum Curatorship Programme.